Parallels between Holywood and Mafia

Just as working class Sicilians formed the Mafia to give themselves a sense of togetherness and protect themselves from bullying landowners, so the Jews who created Hollywood did so partly as a buffer against the protestant elite. Hollywood become a kingdom of their own. And, like Sicilian immigrants, the first generation studio bosses decided to police themselves rather than let outsiders in.
Mafia and the studios have sometimes structured themselves in the same way, with a nominal chief executive acting as a lighting rod-deflecting away from the powerful board. Therefore, Louis B. Mayer may have been the public face of MGM-and for many years, the highest paid executive in America-but its real boss was Nick Schenck, chairman of holding company Loew's in New York. In much the same way, Frank Nitti was the supposed head of the Chicago Outfit, but the real power lay with board members Joe "Batters" Accardo and Murray "the Camel" Humphreys.
Even today, there are similarities between Hollywood and the Mafia. Although there are few barriers to entry into the movie business, at the highest levels Hollywood becomes Costa Nostra, literally translated as 'This Thing of Ours'. One of the famous lines in The Godfather is 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' So today's studio heads attend each other's charity dinners, celebrity golf matches and even go to holiday together.
When former agent Brad Grey took over Paramount in 2005, one of the first things that he did was pay his respects to the other studio bosses-the new godfather doing the rounds of the other dons.
Variety, Hollywood's daily newspaper, refers to studio producer executives as 'capos', an abbreviation of the Mafia term capo regime, or street boss.
The key resemblance between Hollywood and the Mafia is that both are to an extent secret societies, whose members never peak to outsiders. In Mafia parlance, the inner circle has sworn to keep omerta. Don Corleone tells his son never to let anybody outside the family know what he is thinking. In much the same way, Hollywood expels those who break the Sacred Code of Silence. When producer Julia Philips, who won an Academy award for The Sting, wrote an autobiography, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, ridiculing studio executives, the community shunned her. Philips died of cancer in 2002.

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